By 1960 a new generation of African Americans was coming of age (adulthood) and was unwilling to submit tamely to prejudice and segregation and disenfranchisement and job discrimination.

THE FAILURE OF THE ALBANY, GA CAMPAIGN

In 1962 Martin Luther King was invited to join the Albany, GA campaign. The campaign to end segregation in Albany had begun in 1961, under the leadership of Dr. William Anderson, an osteopath, and Charles Sherrod, a student in SNCC. Even with King's support in 1962, the Albany GA movement was not successful.

The authorities in Albany continued to maintain racial segregation in the bus station, waiting room, rest rooms, etc. They arrested civil rights activists on charges of trespassing or disorderly conduct, which would then be handled in the local courts by local segregationist judges. In this way they continued to circumvent and evade the Interstate Commerce Commission and the federal courts.

Laurie Pritchett, the chief of police, non-violently arrested Martin Luther King and the civil rights protesters. There was no police brutality. He made sure there was no racist mob violence. There was no violence, no incident, no crisis, no story. There was segregation in Albany. There was injustice. But there were not the mobs and violence that had accompanied the Freedom Rides. There was nothing for the media to report. The media and the nation ignored Albany. It was as if it weren't even happening. Laurie Pritchett met nonviolent mass protest with nonviolent mass arrests. And he sent the pickets to jails in other towns. In this way his jails in Albany were never filled.

King and his associates learned a bitter lesson from Albany. Reverend Wyatt T. Walker of SCLC said one of the lessons was that you have to choose your target carefully so that you do not dilute your strength. But the lesson was, that the movement needed a crisis in order to get the attention of the media, the nation, and the Federal Government. In the absence of crisis and disorder, the Federal Government would ignore and AVOID situations, and it would simply be "business as usual." In Little Rock, ARK, 1957, there had been a violent mob and a crisis. Eisenhower was forced to intervene. In the Freedom Rides there had been violence and disorder. No matter how reluctantly, the Kennedy admin. intervened. At Oxford, Mississippi, there was a violent riot. Again, Kennedy intervened. The impression was conveyed that if you wanted to force the Federal Government to confront the issue of discrimination in the South, there had to be a crisis to get everyone's attention

The Albany campaign also revealed the friction between SCLC and SNCC. The students in SNCC were jealous of King and the way that he would fly into towns and then fly out, as a celebrity, drawing attention and publicity, but then after he left many people would no longer pay attention to the efforts of SNCC or participate in their protests. King was moving around from place to place lending support to many different efforts.
 

THE BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIGN

PROJECT C: BIRMINGHAM, ALA., 1963

One of King's advisors and colleagues was Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, of Birmingham. Over the years Reverend Shuttlesworth had been beaten in Birmingham. His home had been bombed. But he refused to run. Shuttlesworth begged King to come to Birmingham in 1963. Shuttlesworth, and men like James Farmer of CORE, insisted that the federal government would not get involved and the nation would not take notice of the civil rights movement unless there were a crisis. There had to be an incident. There had to be disorder and chaos and turmoil. In the absence of disorder and turmoil, the federal government continued to ignore segregation and bigotry and injustice in the South. It AVOIDED the issue. That was the bitter lesson of the Albany, GA. campaign. And in January of 1963 King and SCLC decided that Shuttlesworth was right. They designed Project C, C for Confrontation, to generate a crisis (Eyes, p. 181).

The strategy of MLK and SCLC was to provoke or orchestrate a crisis. They expected Bull Connor to over-react. They set a trap for him, and baited him, the way that one waves a red flag in front of a bull to provoke him, or the way that one growls at a dog to excite him. King knew that white supremacy was a system of violence that degraded and humiliated and victimized black people. He wanted to draw or flush the violent segregationists "out in to the open," to dramatize to the nation and the world the injustice that Afro-American people suffered daily. King said that to bear witness to violence and point to it, is not to create it. He merely wanted to expose this violence to the nation in order to awaken and move the conscience of the nation to intervention. King and SCLC did not create the violence that would eventually erupt in Birmingham. They knew Bull Connor well enough to know that they could count on him to over react. They could not know in advance exactly what form the over reaction would take. And dramatic violence, caught on camera and film, would help the movement. King and SCLC did not want deadly violence, however. And the presence of television cameras and photographers usually inhibited the level of violence that Southern segregationists employed.

A DIVIDED WHITE POWER STRUCTURE

Birmingham, Alabama was a city in turmoil. In Jan. 1963 Governor George Wallace proclaimed "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." (Eyes, p. 183). Meanwhile, the elite in Birmingham was divided. Birmingham was a city of 350,000, and 40% black. It was a center of steel production. In the Freedom Rides of 1961, on Mother's Day, Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor had called away the police to give the KKK 15 minutes alone with the Freedom Riders. The attack generated nationwide attention, and embarrassed the business community. Moderate segregationists, especially businessmen, preferred a more sophisticated approach. Birmingham voted to change the city charter to provide for a mayor and a city council of 9 members (Eyes, p. 181). A moderate segregationist, Albert Boutwell, ran against Bull Connor for mayor. Boutwell defeated Bull Connor in the election for mayor. In defeat, Bull Connor challenged the outcome in court. And he remained commissioner of public safety while the courts heard the case. But meanwhile Birmingham had two rival governments, each of which claimed to be the legitimate government. And the Alabama Supreme Court did not make a decision until May (Eyes, p. 194).

But in the interim, King and SCLC launched Project C in Birmingham. For King, moderate segregationist Boutwell was little better than open, hard-line, overt white supremacist Bull Connor. Afro-Americans were not trying to substitute a moderate white supremacist for an openly reactionary white supremacist. They were struggling to overthrow white supremacy and segregation period. And the division in Birmingham gave King and SCLC a golden opportunity.
 

MASS ARRESTS OF THE ADULTS

SCLC went to Birmingham in March of 1963. They held protests and marches. Five hundred people, adults, were arrested. The money to bail people out of jail ran out.  King said that he did not know if he could raise more money to bail people out of jail. But he could go into jail, like everybody else, and share the hardship that he was asking the rank-and-file to endure. A leader cannot ask "the people" to do what he himself is not willing to do. King then decided to get himself arrested. He  deliberately violated an injunction issued by a state court, and led a protest, and was arrested.

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL

In April King himself went to jail, from whence he wrote his famous "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Moderate white clergymen accused King of being a trouble-maker, and suggested that moderates would improve the conditions in Birmingham if King would just leave them alone and give them time. Had not the people elected Boutwell over Bull Connor?

But in his famous Letter, King said he had never heard of a civil rights protest that was "well-timed." And black people all their lives had been told, "wait," and wait almost always meant "NEVER."

As Thurgood Marshall observed, by 1963 the Emancipation Proclamation was 100 years old. To him, and to most black people, 100 years seemed like long enough to wait for the end of slavery, disguised and reconfigured as segregation and disenfranchisement. They would wait no longer. They would not give moderates like Boutwell, or even John Kennedy, time to decide that it was convenient or expedient or easy to end segregation. King asked, rhetorically, what gives one man the right to set the timetable for another man’s freedom? Time was up. Black America would give white America no more time to end segregation. And King was not willing to wait until Kennedy's second term to demand rights that black people were supposed to have under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, rights that had been abridged since 1877.
 

 THE CHILDREN'S MARCH

With more than 500 adults in jail and all of the bail money gone, the movement was in danger of running out of steam. King accepted release from jail and paid his bond. He then begged adults to engage in more picketing and sitting in at the segregated lunch counters in downtown Birmingham. He simply could not get anymore adults to do it. King wanted to fill the jails with thousands of nonviolent protesters, so that the city of Birmingham would have no more capacity to arrest anyone, and then it would have to give in and desegregate the lunch counters.

King had used every weapon he possessed. He had no more weapons to fight with. His back was against the wall. He was desperate. At this critical juncture Reverend James Bevel urged the controversial children's campaign. SCLC called up its reserves, its reinforcements-- the black children and teenagers.
In the Afro-American church, children as young as six years of age can make a decision to be baptized. Baptism is given to children if they make a decision of their own free will, and satisfy the pastor that they understand that Jesus is the resurrected messiah.

Bevel argued that if children can make a decision of whether or not to be baptized, they can make a decision of whether or not to participate in a civil rights protest. Reluctantly, King agreed. It was not what he would have preferred. But he had no other weapons left. This was a last resort.

On May 2nd, 1963, more than 600 school children did not go to school. Instead, under the direction of SCLC, they gathered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. From there, they began a protest march past the park to the segregated downtown stores. The school children marched, for one block. Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor lost his temper. He could not hide his contempt for blacks. He could not "keep his cool." What followed was one of the most famous, or infamous, episodes of the Civil Rights movement. In fact, it was a turning point. Connor ordered the firefighters to turn high pressure hoses on the youngsters. He turned the police dogs on them. Though it was not caught on camera, cattle prods reportedly were used to disperse the young people. Three children were bitten by dogs, and the Associated Press captured the infamous photograph of a policeman holding a dog as it bit 15 year old Walter Gadsden. This single photograph reduced Birmingham and segregation to its barest and crudest essence. This single photograph summarized the vicious reality of segregation in the South. This photograph appeared in newspapers all over the United States and all over the world. It was seen in Europe. It was seen in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Iran, from which the US imported most of its oil. It was seen in Russia and China and Japan and Korea. It was seen by millions of black African people in Zambia and Zaire (from which the US imported copper), and Nigeria and Ghana. It looked similar to photographs from South Africa, or photographs of the East Germans at the Berlin Wall. It was seen by millions of brown people in India and Pakistan and Egypt and Brazil and Cuba. The United States looked bad before the entire world. President Milton Obote of Uganda sent an official protest deploring the mistreatment of Afro-Americans in the US. Some people suggested that the US should be brought before the United Nations on charges of violating the human rights of Afro-Americans.

Furthermore, on May 2nd more than 600 children were taken to Birmingham jail. The eyes of the world saw the defender of the Free World placing hundreds of children in jail. What kind of society, people asked, places children in jail?

VIOLENCE AND DISORDER

Unlike Albany, this was brutality. This was terrible turmoil and disorder. This was violence. This was police brutality. This was an incident. This was a crisis. And the media was there to show it. This was a story. In a single word, the difference between Albany and Birmingham was VIOLENCE. The whole nation, indeed the whole world saw the spectacle of white authorities brutalizing innocent Afro-American school children.

THE WORLD REACTS

The Children's Campaign (Taylor Branch calls it the Children's Miracle) was a major turning point in the civil rights movement. The Associated Press photograph of a white policeman, looking rather like a Nazi in his dark sunshades, showed the officer holding the dog close enough to 15 year old Walter Gadsden that the dog bites him. In fact, during the Birmingham campaign three people were bitten by police dogs. At that time, only a year after the Cuban missile crisis, America was competing with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World-- in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East, in a world of people of color. The United States now had to explain how the leader of the Free World allowed something like this to happen in the citadel of democracy. Americans were shocked. They were amazed. They were embarrassed. Most especially, white Americans were ashamed. How would parents, black or white, explain this photograph to their children? How would America explain it to the world? How was this racism any worse than the communism that Americans always deplored? Even Southerners could not believe what they were seeing. This could not be happening in America. But it was happening in America. Shame became one of the most potent weapons or tools of the civil rights movement. When white America looked in the mirror and did not like what it saw reflected back, then white America understood the need for change. As the Black Panthers later said, shame is truly the most revolutionary emotion.

Officials in Washington called Birmingham, and asked King how long children would be used in demonstrations. The reply was "until we run out of children."

For several days the children continued to march, in greater and greater numbers. Ultimately more than 1,000 children marched and were arrested, and finally every single space in jail was filled. The movement had filled the jails, and it was no longer possible to arrest anyone because there was no place to put them. Of course, this was exactly what Gandhi had done in India. The turmoil in Birmingham touched a raw nerve for Afro-America. Dick Gregory rushed to Birmingham. Former heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson came to Birmingham,as did the new heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston (before Ali). Jackie Robinson went to Birmingham to express solidarity with the cause (Parting The Waters, p. 791). If black children could place their lives in danger and in harm's way to stand up for an end to segregation, how could any self-respecting black man do less? Or fail to stand with them? Indeed, as Reverend Bevel said, the way to get adults involved in a movement is to get their children involved.

BIRMINGHAM AS A SYMBOL

Birmingham was a very large part of what finally pushed John Kennedy to ask Congress for a civil rights bill in June 1963. Birmingham was the catalyst. And Birmingham became the symbol of why America had to change, and end legalized, compulsory, state-sponsored or de jure racial segregation.

But Birmingham had no recognized city government. Street fighting between black sand whites downtown erupted. Therefore, the business leaders negotiated an agreement with King and SCLC to end segregation in the downtown stores. It was announced on May 10 (Eyes, p. 193). There would be a cooling off period of 60 days, after which the "whites only" signs would be taken down, and three Afro-American clerks would be hired at each of the major downtown stores.

THE NEED FOR A "CRISIS"

King and his associates had been very disheartened by Albany. To put it harshly, it seemed that much of white America did not care about civil rights and segregation and racial injustice, OR AT LEAST DIDN'T CARE ENOUGH TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.  It seemed that America did not care unless there was a crisis, unless there was turmoil, unless there was violence, unless there was disorder. In the absence of a crisis, most of America stood by silent, and neutral and indifferent. And therefore SCLC had gone to Birmingham with the deliberate strategy of provoking and precipitating a crisis.

Fred Shuttlesworth assured King that if he and SCLC came to Birmingham there would be a crisis. Bull Connor was such a bigot that they counted on him to overreact and to lose his cool and to resort to violence and brutality. That is WHY they chose Birmingham. Because they knew the personality of Bull Connor. They were counting on Bull Connor. Martin Luther King and SCLC went to Birmingham in 1963 with the deliberate and premeditated strategy of provoking Bull Connor. As Andrew Young has said, "We counted on Bull Connor to do our work for us."

The frenzy of violence in Birmingham at the beginning of May appalled the nation. Liberals and moderates in the white North began to write letters and send telegrams. What was the president doing about it? What was the Congress doing? The political pressure began to mount to do something. Kennedy began to feel the heat for federal intervention.

RIOT IN BIRMINGHAM (Parting The Waters, p. 795-796)

On May 10-11 Bull Connor and KKK Dragon Ronald Shelton denounced the agreement made by the business community. The KKK held a rally. King had left the city, but a bomb exploded at the Gaston Motel where he had been staying. People gathered to look. Governor Wallace sent in Alabama state troopers. They tried to disperse the blacks, and resorted to violence against them. There was pushing, shoving, rock throwing. The outcome was what was called a riot, by lower class blacks in Birmingham, who retaliated with violence and burned buildings and cars (Eyes, p. 194). Thirty five blacks and five whites were injured. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was alarmed and persuaded his brother to send 3,000 federal troops to Fort McClellan, 30 miles outside of Birmingham, as a precaution (Operation Oak Tree, see Branch, p. 800). This riot alarmed John Kennedy. He was afraid that full-scale racial violence would erupt, with blacks retaliating against whites, and that Birmingham would explode in a "race war."  There was the potential for an endless number of Birminghams.
 

DURAGRAHA

At Birmingham King was not placing his emphasis on bringing about a moral transformation in the oppressor. Instead, he was trying to reach a different audience, a third party. That third party was really the liberal, white middle class of the North. King wanted this third party, which had been sitting on the sidelines, neutral and uninvolved, as a bystander, to assert itself and to intervene in the struggle. He wanted the powerful Northern, white middle class to put pressure on the Federal Government to intervene in the civil rights movement, on the side of the oppressed and abused party, to end the oppression by the oppressor. This is duragraha. The purpose of duragraha is to bring about the intervention of the 3rd party, on the side of the oppressed people, and against the oppressor. You want the "neutral" bystander, the 3rd party, to take a side--the side of the oppressed person or persons AGAINST the oppressor. And what happened at Birmingham was that the Northern white middle-class liberals were horrified and were moved.

Conservative          Neutral                    Liberal           Progressive
                            Indifferent
 
 

The liberals had been sympathetic all along. But the horror of Birmingham moved and reached a segment of people who previously had not gotten involved. It took the pictures (and video) of black children being menaced by dogs, at the hands of policemen, to move much of white American to demand federal legislation and federal intervention to forcibly end  segregation in the South. Birmingham was a masterpiece of duragraha. It reached the neutral third party (the moderate white North, the moderates in Congress), who then DEMANDED federal intervention (civil rights legislation) to end the oppression.

But the dramatic play of Birmingham worked because King presented a simple script. The Afro-Americans, especially the children, were peaceful, innocent VICTIMS. The segregationists were violent and brutal. It was clear to any audience who was the "good guy" and who was the "bad guy." This won the sympathy and indignation of the "audience" against the segregationists. However, if the blacks had been violent (in the beginning), the public might have seen them as instigators or agitators looking for a fight, who then got what they deserved. In order to win the sympathy and intervention of the third party, one party must appear to be an innocent, peaceful victim. King played the victim role to perfection.

After the settlement was reached on May 10, Robert Kennedy and MLK worked to raise money to bail the protesters out of jail. Secretly, Harry Belafonte got money from a NYC union. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave more than $40,000. George Meany of the AFL-CIO gave $80,000, and Walter Reuther of the UAW gave $40,000 and David McDonald of the Steelworkers gave $40,000 (Parting the Waters, 788-789). The leadership of organized labor was an ally of the civil rights movement (rank-and-file is another issue), and a crucial stakeholder or constituency in the Democratic Party.

CHANGE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Birmingham brought about a change of consciousness. Before Birmingham many moderate and neutral Northern whites wanted to believe that if you gave the South enough time, it would eventually see the error of its ways and change, on its own. But a system that could turn dogs on children was seen to be so brutal, so primitive, so sick that it would never change on its own. After Birmingham many Americans concluded that the South would only change if some external force compelled it to change. Furthermore, the eruption of black retaliation revealed that this was now urgent. Afro-Americans would no longer peacefully endure injustice. They would fight back and burn American down first. This was no longer a problem that could be avoided or delayed or put off until later. It threatened to explode in everyone's face.

VIOLENCE IS NOT WHAT KING PREFERRED

Violence was not what King preferred. But after Albany he came to see that many Americans would not take a stand unless they were confronted with a crisis, and violence. And SCLC concluded that if violence and a crisis were what it took to move white America, then the movement would go to Birmingham to orchestrate the crisis that the nation seemed to need. If violence was what it took, then King would let Bull Connor give the nation the violence that the nation seemed to "need." King's genius was in understanding that this was what it would take for the civil rights movement to reach moderate and even conservative white Americans. However it hurt him deeply to think that so many Americans were so callous and indifferent to the welfare of their fellow human beings that it took the sight of dogs biting children to "reach" them. But King was determined to do whatever it would take to FORCE white America to stop living in denial, and to stop hiding behind the bystander mentality, and to end the injustice of segregation and the denial of the human rights of Afro-Americans. But again, power without love (for humanity and the welfare of other human beings) is tyranny. Love (which Afro-Americans had plenty of) without power (which Afro-Americans had almost none of) is slavery. But power joined with love (for humanity) is JUSTICE.

KING: WHITE AMERICA MUST BE FORCED TO KNOW THE TRUTH

Many white Americans, especially in the North, wanted to believe that they were "innocent." They were not segregationists. They were not white supremacists. They were not doing anything to anyone. They were not oppressing anybody. But so many white Americans ignored the situation in the South and pretended not to know. King would not let America, any longer, get away with the excuse "oh, we didn't know." The media brought the sickening spectacle into everyone's living room. (Indeed, the drama of Birmingham would not have worked without the photographs and the television cameras to show the country what was happening)  King wanted to change public opinion, and educate America about the injustice and oppression of segregation. King would FORCE America to know the terrorism of segregation and white supremacy in the South, and he would insist that as a matter of conscience, white America must ACT and DO SOMETHING to eradicate the evil.  (The problem with knowing the "truth" is that with the knowledge of the "truth" comes the responsibility to act on what you know: sometimes the knowledge is more than some people can bear.) Those who stand by and allow the evil to continue but do nothing to stop it are accomplices, and they are as guilty as the perpetrators. "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing."

AMERICA CHERISHES ITS SENSE OF INNOCENCE (I AM NOT GUILTY)

The behavior of Bull Connor in Birmingham pricked the conscience of white America. White America had an image of itself as "the land of the free and the home of the brave," a democracy "with liberty and justice for all." Birmingham shattered that self-image. It made many white Americans feel bad about themselves and their country and their self-image. It shattered their sense of innocence (I am innocent because I haven't done anything to anybody), and confronted them with the accusation of complicity in evil and injustice, and the accusation of sharing in collective guilt. Such a sense of implicit accusation and "guilt by association" was unbearable for many (white) Americans. If there is one thing that Americans historically have cherished, it is the sense that our society is more "just" and is "better than" repressive dictatorships abroad or totalitarian regimes, etc. We cherish our sense of innocence and superior moral virtue (Britain and France and Japan are "guilty" of imperialism; Germany was "guilty" of two world wars and the Holocaust and militarism; Russia was guilty of tsarist despotism, and the Soviet Union and China guilty of communist totalitarianism and aggression) Everyone else has "blood on their hands," but "our hands are clean." We are not guilty. Birmingham threatened America's flattering and self congratulatory image of itself. It made us, as a country, look guilty. The threat had to be corrected and removed. Historically, America needs to feel good about itself and to feel "justified." A nation that has a need to feel superior to others (especially morally superior) and better than others has an image (and a lot) to "live up to." Brutality toward children was not consistent with America's exalted image of itself (the Puritan "city on a hill," the light of the world, a beacon of freedom). A country that is not so concerned about questions of guilt and innocence would not be as susceptible to an appeal to conscience. King's nonviolence would not have worked in Nazi Germany.

NONVIOLENCE AS A "PLOY"

The civil rights activists were nonviolent. But they knew that their peaceful disobedience probably would provoke their segregationist opponents to violence. King never gave up his commitment to nonviolence, on his part or on the part of his followers. When the segregationists or white supremacists resorted to violence, this would then make the segregationists look bad and turn public opinion against the segregationists. The people who "followed" King were like actors in a play. They understood the strategy and the script. They realized some of the dangers and the risks. They CHOSE to take those risks and to place themselves in harm's way to express dissent and civil disobedience against unjust laws, and to make a point and to generate pressure for change. The children, as  a peer group, chose to become participants in a struggle that might offer them a better future. King shared the same risks and dangers as the "rank-and-file." The purpose of the nonviolent civil disobedience was to expose the violence and injustice of the segregationist system, to draw it out into the open where everyone could see it. The objective was to make the system look so bad that this would generate a wave of indignation and revulsion, and public opinion would conclude that the system was intolerable and must be changed immediately. The purpose was to move public opinion to DEMAND intervention and an end to oppression. And a system must be pretty bad if even children are moved to stand up against it. The Children's Campaign was an indictment of the abuses of the segregationist system.

A WAVE OF INDIGNATION

Birmingham ignited a firestorm that swept across the country. All over the country Afro-Americans and nonracist whites took to the streets in protests. In the ten weeks after May 10th, there were 758 demonstrations,  in 186 American cities, involving 14,733 arrests. This wave of protests  included Raleigh, NC; Albany, GA; Greensboro, NC, and Durham, NC, and Cambridge MD and Danville, VA. Two white men chained themselves to a railing in the Ohio state legislature and vowed to stay until segregation was ended (Pillar of Fire, p. 89). The police cut the chains off. On June 3, 1963 the Republicans  in Congress (Representative John Lindsey of NY and 23 Republican co-sponsors) introduced their own civil rights bill, proposing an end to segregation in all places of public accommodation. This really "showed up" Kennedy and the Democrats. How could Kennedy, who had received 68% of the Afro-American vote, do less? By June 10, there were 3,000 people (many of them white) picketing and protesting outside of the Justice Dept. in Washington, DC, and criticizing the Kennedy administration for dragging its feet on the issue of civil rights. The criticism stung the Kennedys.

The pressure was building. The issue could no longer be ignored. Kennedy felt the heat. He began to realize that the time had come to take action.

ROBERT KENNEDY'S MEETING WITH JAMES BALDWIN, ET AL

On May 24th James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry (author of A Raisin in the Sun) and Jerome Smith of CORE were invited to meet  with Robert Kennedy. They criticized the Kennedy administration for lack of leadership on the issue of civil rights. RFK replied that Afro-Americans seemed to have little trouble finding leadership of their own to lead them onto the streets, and expressed concern about the Nation of Islam. Jerome Smith observed that the Nation was not active in the demonstrations in Birmingham, but he was ready to take up a gun himself. Baldwin asked Smith if he could imagine fighting for the US. Smith replied "never, never." RFK questioned his patriotism, and was astonished at such an expression of disloyalty. Smith questioned why Afro-Americans should feel loyalty to a country in which they were brutalized and degraded, and their government stood by powerless to stop it, and did nothing about it. Finally Hansberry too became disgusted, and led a walkout by some of the Afro-Americans who had been invited to  talk with RFK. RFK was shocked and angered by the extent of their alienation, but also alarmed about what it portended. Robert Kennedy feared that if the power structure did not make concessions to black moderates such as King, there was a distinct danger that the masses of Afro-Americans would become so alienated that they would turn to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and violence against whites. If Malcolm and the Nation were the alternative, then the Kennedy's and moderate whites found MLK much more preferable.
 

JFK ASKS FOR A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

To repeat, by June 1963 the Republicans introduced bills in the Congress to end segregation in public accommodations. This embarrassed the Democratic administration. 3,000 people, many of them white, picketed outside the Justice Department. Mayor Richard Daley, a fellow Irishman who had been so crucial to Kennedy's election in 1960, told the president that he had never seen black people as "mad" (angry) as they were after Birmingham [the videotapes of black children being attacked by police dogs  struck a nerve that enraged Afro-Americans in a way that words cannot convey: video was even more powerful than still photographs] Angry Northern white liberals demanded to know what Kennedy was doing about the atrocities taking place in the South. Malcolm X denounced Kennedy for failing to protect black children in Birmingham, and the Kennedy administration realized that King was exhausting the means of nonviolent protest. But if one has bent over backwards to bring about peaceful change, and still no change occurs, what is the next step? The next step is that one is then justified in a resort to violence. Malcolm X said that if the white man will not get his house in order, then he doesn’t deserve to have a house. Someone should come along, and burn it down.

The Kennedys fretted that the black masses would turn to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and violence if nonviolent protest did not yield results. Malcolm made King look good. The pressures mounting on Kennedy were now irresistible. Kennedy himself said that he now felt that he had to choose between one civil rights bill or 100 Birminghams (Pillar of Fire, p. 88), and he feared 100 Birminghams more. He feared that Afro-Amercians were now so angry and alienated that they would burn America down (or try to). Afro-Americans would no longer suffer quietly, or in silence. And Kennedy realized that their grievances could no longer be safely ignored or postponed or delayed. Against the political power of the white South in the Senate (the power to filibuster) and in the Electoral College, there was the power of black people to riot and to unleash disorder.

John Kennedy felt that if black people were going to "go out into the streets" he would have preferred for them to do it during someone else's administration. But history was not unfolding according to what was convenient for his timetable. Kennedy did not create the mess. He had inherited it. Almost every president from 1877 to 1960 had avoided the issue as much as possible. Even FDR had acted to issue Executive Order 8802 (nondiscrimination in defense contracting) only because of the threat of a mass march by A. Philip Randolph. Truman had acted to desegregate the armed forces in 1948 because of criticism from Randolph and Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Eisenhower had sent troops to Little Rock only after Governor Faubus embarrassed him and betrayed him. But by 1963 Kennedy had to deal with the accumulated mess that every other president had ignored or avoided for over 80 years. Often, history is not fair.

GEORGE WALLACE "STANDS AT THE SCHOOL HOUSE DOOR"

As President Kennedy himself said, those who make peaceful change impossible, make a violent revolution inevitable. On June 11, George Wallace stood in the door of the University of Alabama to block the admittance of two black students (James Hood and Vivian Malone). He was grandstanding. The entire episode was staged. Both he and Kennedy knew that 3,000 federal troops were stationed nearby in case of trouble, and the Kennedy's were prepared to PREVENT a riot by whites and nip it in the bud rather than in a position of having to gather the troops and take hours to get them there after a potential riot had broken out.  (This was what Kennedy had learned from the fiasco of the riot at Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, when James Meredith tried to register at Ole Miss.) Kennedy also federalized the Alabama National Guard. When the federal marshals and the Alabama National Guard moved past Wallace, he could say that he had done everything in his power to defend the Southern way of life, but he had been overpowered by federal authority. In this way he would pose as the champion and defender and martyr of the cause of segregation. In losing the battle to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama, he was winning votes with his segregationist constituents. The politics of the situation was that for Wallace, this defeat was victory. Wallace's political posturing was staged for the television cameras, and meanwhile the two students were quietly registered in another location, elsewhere on campus, off-camera.

KENNEDY'S TELEVISED ADDRESS

John Kennedy wanted to get Afro-Americans "off of the streets" and "out of the streets." He hoped that an announcement that he would ask the Congress for a civil rights bill would help to "chill black people out" and bring a pause  in the demonstrations. His worst nightmare was a violent clash between black demonstrators and Klansmen that would erupt into a full scale race riot (race war) and require him to send in the Army. On the evening of the very day  that Governor Wallace stood in the school house door at the University of Alabama, June 11, 1963, at the urging of Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy went on national television to publicly announce that he would ask the Congress for federal legislation to end segregation in public places, (a civil rights act). Kennedy said that this was a moral issue, "as old as the Scriptures," and that "race has no place in American life or law." That bill was the federal intervention that King and the movement had wanted all along. That bill was why King had gone to Birmingham in the first place. He knew that Kennedy was reluctant to take action. He knew that Kennedy would have preferred to avoid the civil rights minefield. So King had gone to Birmingham to orchestrate the pressure that would force Kennedy's hand, and compel him to take action--whether he wanted to or not. King was trying to maneuver Kennedy and the federal government into a corner, where the neutral third party would have no choice but to intervene on behalf of the weaker, oppressed party. (nonviolent coercion)
 

BIRMINGHAM AS THE CATALYST

As I have said several times now, Birmingham and its aftermath was the catalyst that pushed John Kennedy to announce publicly in June 1963 that he would send a civil rights bill to the Congress. Kennedy sent the bill to Congress on June 19th, and it proposed to end segregation in all places of public accommodation and in public education, and to ban discrimination in ANY firm that received federal contracts or any agency or entity that received federal funds. On June 22, 1963 Kennedy met with some of the civil rights leaders (King, A. Philip Randolph, Wilkins of the NAACP) and they informed him of their determination to hold a mass march on Washington. During the conversation they talked about Bull Connor. Facetiously, jokingly, JFK said "I don't think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, Bull Connor has done more for civil rights than anyone in this room" (Charles and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate, p. 21).  Kennedy's tongue-in-cheek remark meant that Bull Connor's performance in Birmingham had done more to move and reach the large segment of white public opinion that was silent and indifferent, and moved it to DEMAND and CRY OUT for federal legislation against segregation, legislation that would use federal power to COERCE the South to end segregation. Bull Connor had thus managed to make segregation look so bad that he discredited it. He had managed to do in a week what the civil rights movement and liberals had NOT been able to do in 9 years (since the Brown decision of 1954) or even in 50 years (since the founding of the NAACP in 1909)!

ASSASSINATION OF MEDGAR EVERS

This announcement by Kennedy so outraged white supremacists (Klan types) that on that very night Medgar Evers of the NAACP, in Jackson, Miss. was assassinated . As a veteran, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy was horrified by the murder, and expressed his sorrow to Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers. He could not believe that 98 years after Appomattox (end of the Civil War), such a murder could happen in America. But it showed the nation yet again the depths of violence and brutality in the white supremacist South. It showed the naked terrorism of white supremacy. The venom of the South was coming out into the open for all to see.

Subsequently, in 1964, Byron de la Beckwith was charged with the murder. Two all white juries ended in stalemated juries. In 1993 District Attorney Bobby DeLaughter reopened the case, and a new trial was held on the grounds that new evidence had been discovered. The body of Medgar Evers was exhumed, and a cause of death established. The rifle allegedly used to kill Evers had the finger print of de la Beckwith on it. And at a Klan rally in the 1970s, Beckwith had publicly proclaimed that he had killed Evers and gotten away with it. Klan informants turned against Beckwith. In 1994 a jury of eight Afro-Americans and four whites found him guilty. He was sentenced to prison, and died of a heart attack in January 2001, at the age of 80. The story of Medgar Evers is related in the film Ghosts of Mississippi (Whoopi Goldberg).

On August 28, 1963 the March on Washington was held, and it became a massive lobbying campaign to put pressure on the Congress to pass the civil rights bill. They didn't have a march just to have a march. The political purpose of the March on Washington was to exert pressure on the Congress to pass the civil rights bill. It was a lobbying effort. More than 250,000 people attended. King initially wanted massive civil disobedience (sit-ins) to express dissent against segregation. The Kennedy's would have preferred that there be no march, because they were afraid it would antagonize the Congress (no one likes to act under duress). The compromise was a march rather than sit-ins. Malcolm X watched from his hotel in washington, DC, and called it the "Farce on Washington."